Did Anyone Really Think Google Wouldn't Build An Outlook-To-Gmail Migration Tool?

from the deep-sea-fishing dept

As Google's Gmail product has grown, it should come as absolutely no surprise that the company would offer up a tool to migrate users of Microsoft Outlook/Exchange over to Gmail. However, it appears to have come as a surprise to a small startup that offered similar tools in partnership with Google. That company has now sued Google claiming trade secrets were taken. From the details in the article, it appears that Google partnered with this small company that had developed such software as a rapid way of offering such functionality. Then, while all that was happening, it was developing its own such tools. This shouldn't be a surprise -- since migrating people over from Microsoft's email solutions is clearly a priority for Google, and it's no surprise that Google would want to have control over that technology.

Yet this startup seems to believe that a simple partnership with Google means that it was guaranteed to always remain Google's partner and that Google would never build similar functionality in-house. If anything, this seems like sour grapes from a company that perhaps didn't put together a very good contract with Google and didn't recognize the obvious path for Google's own development efforts. Not surprisingly, perhaps, this lawsuit is being prosecuted by the same lawyer who recently was on the losing end of a different lawsuit against Google (the infamous "American Blinds" case, accusing Google of trademark infringement because competitors could buy ads on American Blinds' trademarks).

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